It should come as no surprise to anyone that Pennsylvania continues to get older. Not the state itself, mind you. We’re talking about the state population’s overall makeup, which has been aging upward for years now, just like the nation’s.

But Pennsylvania is now ... venerable. Only Main, New Hampshire, Vermont, West Virginia and — of course — Florida, have higher median ages than Pennsylvania’s: 40.6 years.

Here’s the most important piece of information from projections released by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Pennsylvania State Data Center:

The state’s senior population is growing 20 times faster than Pennsylvania’s overall population. By 2025, more than one in five Pennsylvanians will be age 65 or older.

The natural follow-up question is this: When that day comes, how is the state going to pay its bills?

Not only will a rapidly aging population create new economic stressors — demand for in-home or nursing home care, public transit, etc. — it will exacerbate old ones as well.

Retirees don’t pay state and local income taxes. And they don’t like it very much when politicians pass the buck (and the resulting need to enact tax increases) off to municipal governments and school boards, which in turn hike property tax rates — nearly a third of which is paid by senior citizen homeowners.

So it seems that Pennsylvania finds itself caught in a pinch — quite literally.

On one side there’s the rapidly aging population, which is expected to add several billion dollars to the state’s list of expenses between now and 2025.

On the other there’s Pennsylvania’s chronic inability to address difficult fiscal questions — whether that’s what to do about the state’s depleted rainy day fund, multi-billion-dollar budget gaps, lackluster economic growth, or a pension funding crisis that only continues to metastasize,

More demands for elder care services and shifting spending habits — senior citizens buy more services and fewer goods, meaning the state’s sales tax collections could suffer — mean solving these issues is going to get more difficult.

But while we’ve seen officials move to get out in front of Pennsylvania’s aging problem — in 2016 the state Department of Aging published a four-year plan to improve senior services — there’s little reason to be optimistic about lawmakers solving its money problem.

That would require bold ideas, or at the very least a commitment to produce an on-time, complete and fully-functional budget for the 2018-19 fiscal year.